[ale] vmware and W2K v. WXP

James P. Kinney III jkinney at localnetsolutions.com
Wed May 8 20:06:21 EDT 2002


By running the app in a Vmware window, the security hole of granting
admin privileges to a mere mortal is no longer an issue. The can have
admin rights over the Vmware XP run, but they are still a mere mortal on
the Linux box.

True, the app just may refuse to run on XP. But the major cause of
broken W2K apps on XP is the massive permissions rewrite.

On Wed, 2002-05-08 at 17:39, Jeff Hubbs wrote:
> James P. Kinney III wrote:
> 
> > I would almost put money on the problem being the permission structure
> > on XP. Unless vmware was _built_ for XP, you will probably need to give
> > the user full administrator rights in order to directly access the
> > hardware layer. 
> > 
> > Trashing XP is a juicy idea, though.
> > 
> > Why not put Linux on as the main OS and run Vmware to guest in the XP?
> > It's a sneaky way to start a migration, but it will solve the problem.
> 
> Jim, it might not.  MS has broken some backward app compatibility.  If 
> there's an app that's broken on XP but not on 2K/NT, it's still going to 
> be broken in the instance of XP running inside VMware; there's no 
> difference as far as the app is concerned.
> 
> On the other hand, trying to run it in Wine (or - what is it called, 
> Plex86 or something?), which presents an original clone of the Win32 API 
> to the app, might work, and if it does, it might be a better way to go 
> than backing down to Win2K because at least if you use Wine, the API 
> issies can be understood and addressed as opposed to them being totally 
> opaque.
> 
> I'm concerned about the possibility that Windows app developers aren't 
> able to get their apps to work adequately without somehow getting into 
> some kind of deal with MS to get full access to API docs - a deal, of 
> course, that would be on MS' terms.
> 
> 
> - Jeff
> 
-- 
James P. Kinney III   \Changing the mobile computing world/
President and CEO      \          one Linux user         /
Local Net Solutions,LLC \           at a time.          /
770-493-8244             \.___________________________./

GPG ID: 829C6CA7 James P. Kinney III (M.S. Physics)
<jkinney at localnetsolutions.com>
Fingerprint = 3C9E 6366 54FC A3FE BA4D 0659 6190 ADC3 829C 6CA7 




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